1. Field of Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to systems and methods for managing risk by detecting fraudulent activity and more particularly to apparatus and methods for presenting analytically-driven fraud detection information to a user via a user interface.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Fraudulent activities belonging to various categories are a significant issue for a wide variety of business concerns. For instance, within the U.S. retail industry, shrink due to employee theft totals close to $16 billion annually. While in the U.S. healthcare industry, waste and abuse amounts to between $125 and $175 billion annually. Similarly, the U.S. financial sector is plagued with frauds including check fraud, ATM fraud, debit fraud and credit fraud. For example, check fraud, which is a perennial problem in the financial sector, amounts to approximately $1 billion in losses annually.
Defrauders utilize checks to perpetrate frauds in several ways. For instance, one category of fraud, referred to in the art as “On-Us” Fraud, involves presentment of fraudulent checks that are drawn on accounts held by the bank. These checks may be forged, altered or outright counterfeits. If honored, “On-Us” checks result in losses to the bank.
Another category of deposit account fraud involves new account scams, account takeovers and other schemes that involve defrauding accounts and gaining access to the funds they contain. In these situations, checks are drawn on a bank other than the bank at which it is presented. As with “On-Us” checks, if these checks are honored, they result in losses to the bank.
Still another category of fraud involving checks is referred to as check kiting. Check kiting is a specialized case of Deposit Fraud that involves presenting a check without sufficient funds to cover the amount of the check. After presenting a first check as a deposit to one account, kiters quickly deposit another check from a second account to cover the first check, creating an opportunity to use float—the gap between when checks are presented and cleared—to their advantage. Kiting can be accidental or intentional, small-scale or very large.
Software that is designed to aid in the detection of fraudulent activities exists. Many of these conventional packages offer rudimentary user interfaces that display unadorned transactional information. Users of these software packages are often forced to review large amounts of this transactional information in search of fraudulent activity. Even so, many business concerns use fraud detection software to identify and stop fraudulent activities, thereby saving themselves and others from significant financial losses.